Patch 5.4 - Updated Garrosh Model
Along with the corrupted looking Garrosh model, Patch 5.4 also added an updated version of the normal Garrosh model. This version has a face that can express emotion and hands that have moving fingers.

Patch 5.4 - World Changes
Two of the bigger changes to come to the world in Patch 5.4 are the corruption in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms and increased activity in Orgrimmar and Razor Hill.

The Vale of Eternal Blossoms has been drained dry of any water and corruption has spread throughout most of the Vale, damaging things. Unfortunately the Golden Pagoda did not survive, so you won't be able to do the Golden Lotus daily quests anymore! You can also see a new raid entrance under the center of what was once a lake.

Over in Orgrimmar, the Kor'kron Elite have taken over the job of guarding the city and have an increased presence throughout town. Meanwhile, in Razor Hill, you can find some Orgrimmar Refugees camped out, as well as Baine and Vol'jin standing in town with their troops.

Hunter Pets summoned by Stampede now only use auto-attacks against their target. [Requires a realm restart]

Steady Shot now deals 10% more damage. [Requires a realm restart]

Talents

Blink Strikes now has a 10-yard minimum range, and the teleportation effect cannot happen more than once every 20 seconds. [Requires a realm restart]

Quests

Destroying the Altars: Master Summoner Zarod should once again drop Master Summoner's Staff, allowing players to complete the quest.

The Might of Three: Buffs from the four celestials should now continue to work properly for players entering the Big Blossom Excavation area. [Requires a realm restart]

Creatures

Bleeding Hollow Tormentor no longer summons a Bleeding Hollow Worg.

Raids, Dungeons, and Scenarios

Throne of Thunder

Durumu the Forgotten

Elixir of Detect Lesser Invisibility will no longer allow players to see fog beasts while they are invisible.

Fixed an issue where Azure Fog may incorrectly trigger Flash Freeze at the end of the Light Spectrum phase.

Ji-Kun

Fixed an issue where players intercepting food globules were not properly gaining stacks of Slimed, preventing them from obtaining higher stacks of the Primal Nutrient damage buff.

Lei Shen

Lei Shen will now always drop a Titan Runestone or Secrets of the Empire for players that are on the legendary quest line. [Requires a realm restart]

Brawler's Guild

Ro-Shambo should now properly display the UI for Rock, Paper, Scissors! if the character was casting a spell at the time.

Bug Fixes

Rocketway rockets in Azshara should no longer be despawning too quickly after being summoned.

Mac

Fixed an issue where changing the resolution settings could cause hot corners to not work correctly on Mac OS X 10.8.

Fixed an issue where binding a modifier key to a mouse button could cause the modifier key to become stuck.

Fixed an issue where certain circumstances could cause the cursor to become smaller than intended on the Retina MacBook Pro.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Virtual Realmscan someone explain how this works, and which realms will be linked together etc? Will I be seeing people from WRA etc in Stormwind?
We're working on an article currently that will explain more about Virtual Realms in detail. We're hoping to have it out to you all soon and will do our best to answer as many questions as you have as possible.

Keep in mind, we've only released the PTR notes at this point and still have testing, refining, more testing, gathering constructive feedback, testing, and then... when we think it's actually ready, releasing this live. While we have an idea of when we think we are going to have the patch go live, it's no guarantee that everything will go as expected (*crosses her fingers*). This isn't something that's going to be out in a week or anything.

You mean listening to the complaints of the players and then promptly spitting in their faces?
I've never "spit" in anyone's face in my life, I assure you.

Ghostcrawler said it yesterday in a tweet, consider the PTR like a petri dish. We're going to put things on there from time to time to test out how they work. By doing this, we get to see the results without having to commit them and affect a larger population of players in a "permanent" way. Constructive feedback from testers is always a valuable commodity as is just having people go in to the PTR and playing like they normally would so that we can see the effect of the changes.

As I also said, Virtual Realms will not be releasing overnight. There's still time before we go live with them and we still have more to do to make sure they work in a way that makes sense and adds value to the community they serve. Again, I think once we get more details in front of people, and are able to answer more questions about it and what it will do, the more likely many of the concerns I've seen here will be addressed. And if they're not, we'll work to address them as much as possible.

Area 52 currently has queues as high as 1300 just to get on. Are these super high pop realms going to be merged with other super high pop realms? A52 is mostly horde, but if we merge with a mostly alliance server, we're looking at double the queue if we have another 1300 alliance also trying to get on. That's the major concern I have, is population and massive queues, especially with everything being 50% off and more people coming to our already flooded server.
I can't answer about specific realms or how they will be connected (or not) currently, but I can say that we're very aware of the need to balance between a having a healthy population and ending up with queues. We will want to make sure that people can get in and play when they want to and still have people and resources they can rely on to have a great play experience. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 5.4 Set BonusesI don't think these will go live in their current state in rated PvP.
You're correct, the numbers on set bonuses are actually just place holders for the moment. At this time try focusing your feedback for set bonuses around the actual mechanics rather than the tuning of the numbers. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

LFR and Flex Loot Restriction
Our very own “Crabby” recently tweeted (#1#2) about loot options in Flexible Raids. Just in case some of you missed it, we’re considering the possibility of having certain pieces of loot drop only in Flexible, Normal and Heroic raids.

We know that Tier and Legendary items are both very appealing to all types of raiders, but removing either of those from LFR at this point in time would tamper with the consistency of this expansion, there are a lot of players that rely solely on LFR to get those items and they are expecting LFR to continue to have the same sort of philosophy and design until at least the end of the expansion. Drastic and unexpected changes that impact negatively on parts of the player base is something we should try to avoid as much as possible.

So, for now, instead of making tier pieces exclusive to F/N/H raids, we’re considering the possibility of giving exclusivity to F/N/H on certain valuable pieces that don’t belong to any Tier. We know this isn’t exactly what some of you have been asking for, and that is doesn’t solve the issue of players going into LFR for a chance to get a piece of Tier, but it does provide more value and exclusivity/prestige to raids other than LFR without undermining players that have been relying exclusively on LFR as their main endgame progression experience since the start of the expansion.

I’d also like to point out that LFR content has always been staggered, and FR follows that same pattern but at an accelerated pace; that will probably make it less likely for raiders to run LFR in search for Tier drops, unless of course, they still prefer the accessibility of LFR over Flexible raids. I know that being time efficient is what drives many players, and having tier bonuses at the cost of a lower ilvl might still look like a better option than having to organize a Flexible raid. In the end we like to give players more options, and despite what some might say, I don’t think they will be overwhelming with the addition of Flexible Raids.

May I ask what the reason is for the stagger in Flexi? Makes sense in LFR, but not so much for Flexi imo!

You didn't exactly say the reason for flexi, only LFR, but maybe its one and the same?
Same reason as LFR I would say. We want to make a distinction between Normal and Heroic from the rest, players shouldn’t feel very compelled to go into LFR or even FR if they’re into more serious raiding, it’s still ok if there’s some appeal to them just as long as it doesn’t feel absolutely mandatory, especially a few weeks after LFR has opened.

I don’t like to generalize that much and I think that sometimes I inadvertently fall into the trap of extreme generalization. What I mean is, not all raiders are the same. There’s players raiding normal at a very slow pace, others that clear content as fast as it opens, so I can’t really say FR or LFR will be appealing to normal or heroic raiders, I can only imagine that guilds with slower progress will probably go into FR and LFR to help with their progression much more often than a guild that clears all normal content in a week, so I suppose we can say that FR and LFR shouldn’t be very appealing to anyone at a moderate to fast progression rate, but it’s ok if others that are struggling a bit more or those that can’t commit to guild raiding schedules for more than 1 or 2 days a week feel more inclined to try FR and LFR. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Hunter Hotfix Concerns

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

The changes we have coming for Blink Strikes are intended to assist with the regular complaint we hear about peeling Hunter pets. The change will mean that Hunter pets will only be able to Blink Strike once every 20 seconds and there will be a 10 yard minimum range to avoid the pet using it off cooldown when it's already close to the target. We hope that this will help with Hunter pets utilizing large amounts of glue to stick to their targets.

Our plans for Stampede are actually quite simple to explain; we are removing the ability for the pets summoned through Stampede to use any abilities. The end result of this change should be that the pets a Hunter summons from Stampede will only be able to auto-attack. As you are all aware, these changes will result in a quite the reduction of net damage for Hunters, because of this we have also done a minor 15% buff to the damage of Arcane Shot.

So we asked for hunter nerfs since their damage is ridiculously overpowered and instead they're pretty much getting buffed? Not sure if I'm catching your drift.
The damage gained from the buffs you can receive from using Stampede is no longer possible, which lowers Hunter damage. The pets summoned by Stampede can no longer bite/claw/nibble/tickle, they can only use auto-attacks, lowering damage during Stampede. Blink Strikes now has a 20 second cooldown making the pet easier to peel instead of them blinking all over the Arena to their target. These are all nerfs which are heavily targeted at pets which mainly effects Beast Mastery Hunters.

In regards to the "triple trinket" that BM hunters have; we have no plans to remove Bestial Wrath from Readiness at this time. Please continue to present your feedback on these changes though as we're always interested to hear your opinions on them. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We’re aware that the latest round of hotfixes caused some confusion for many Hunters, and want to offer some insight into the logic and reasoning that led to these particular changes.

Patch 5.3 resulted in Hunters feeling a bit stronger in PvP than in 5.2, where we feel they were in a much better place overall. Stampede in particular has been proving troublesome. We originally designed it with an “empty your stables” theme primarily for flavor–we wanted you to be able to see all of your favorite pets. In practice, it turned into more of a “deck building” mini-game, where Hunters were managing their entire stable to bring as much crowd control, raid buffs, etc. as possible. That’s opposite of our intentions with the Mists stable redesign; we want you to be able to pull out whichever pet you feel is ideal for your current situation. If you’re instead filling your stable based on whatever’s ideal for Stampede, you lose that entirely.

Furthermore, this min-maxing led to Stampede being a bit stronger of a DPS cooldown than we’d really like, especially for Beast Masters (who are already quite bursty in PvP). The hotfix lets us tone Stampede back just a little, and once again allows Hunters to keep whichever pets they like in the stable.

With Blink Strikes, our goals with the original 5.3 changes were to reduce Hunter burst for PvP as well as give them a passive talent option. Generally speaking, we prefer active talents to be slightly superior to passive talents in the same tier. No one will choose an active talent if it requires more work for the same reward. So, we wanted Blink Strikes to be DPS-neutral. Instead, it ended up being a PvP buff, hence the hotfix.

Regarding the changes to Arcane Shot, Cobra Shot, and Steady Shot, we had originally only buffed Arcane shot, but there was some risk that it would change Hunter rotations, which wasn’t our intent. We simply wanted to compensate for the Stampede and Blink Strikes changes. Ultimately, our goal with all of these changes is simply to tone back some of the outlying behaviors that were causing Hunters to feel a little too strong in PvP in 5.3, without much impact elsewhere. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Guild Wars 2 Authorized Shoutcaster Program
GW2 is adding an interesting spectator mode to make PvP Shoutcasting easier. It allows authorized shoutcasters to enter matches as a spectator, as well as a Custom Arena to assist them in hosting matches and or creating their own shows.

Wonder how we then would be able to get exalted with the Golden Lotus, hopefully not only from daily HC/Scen, that would make it as tedious as when it was first released without the +100% rep commendention :-P

It is not correct that you won't be able to do Golden Lotus dailies. Some of the later-stage dailies still exist and can be seen on the PTR is you look for them. What is correct is that the opening sequence of Golden Lotus dailies has been removed, including those that start from the Pagoda.

Seriously this is why I love Blizz, their attention to detail is astounding, their humour is amazing. and I LOVE these new expressions, I have every faith that our new race model updates are going to blow us away!

That model looks like something we might be able to see very soon announced as the new orc model. It would make no sense for them to create that model this late into the xpac and throw it away on a boss. Notice how it's vastly superior to any "improved" troll models currently found in ToT, especially in the facial expression department. New running animations, new casting animations, this really looks like the new orc model.

I am really hoping this is an example of what we'll see with the new character models because Garrosh looks great. Also why would they spend so much time on the model to throw it away unless they just custom skinned the new orc model for Garrosh.